#SkyNotFalling
ping
Post to me or FReep mail to be on/off the Bring Out Your Dead ping list.
The purpose of the “Bring Out Your Dead” ping list (formerly the “Ebola” ping list) is very early warning of emerging pandemics, as such it has a high false positive rate.
So far the false positive rate is 100%.
At some point we may well have a high mortality pandemic, and likely as not the “Bring Out Your Dead” threads will miss the beginning entirely.
*sigh* Such is life, and death...
I would expect that if there were a large enough pool of asymptomatic patients, patiently developing their own immunity, that some small fraction would become asymptomatic carriers.
The “millions to be infected by January 2015” claims were made during the “panic politicians into appropriating billions to fight Ebola” stage of the campaign.
A link to this thread has been posted on the Ebola Surveillance Thread
It is like saying Y2K was a farce because there was no disaster and ignoring the billions spent rewriting code beforehand to prevent problems.
Some studies have shown that people in areas where outbreaks have never occurred (but where Ebola may be endemic in the animal reservoir) have found a proportion of the population that is seropositive for Ebola.
In simple English, they show signs of having been exposed without getting sick in areas where there have not been human cases.
Analysis of people living in villages where outbreaks have occurred shows that a high number of those people were exposed and did not get sick.
I suspect that some immune system variants prevent some people from getting ill when they are exposed. Not every microorganism makes everyone sick. It would be nice to know the immune system configuration of those people who do not get sick. Maybe something in that could be exploited as a treatment.